mHealth Blog

The mHealth Monitor blog is an open, collaborative space for experts and practitioners in the field of mHealth to share ideas. The foundational posts will feature thinking that originated at a workshop in December 2015, when the National Cancer Institute (NCI) convened a group of 20 thought leaders in the field of mHealth, smoking cessation, and evaluation. The primary objective of this meeting was to find ways to explore key scientific methods that allow for evaluation of smart design efforts to help people quit smoking, while keeping pace with technology. While the first set of posts will focus on evaluation, our goal is to amplify the conversation within the larger mHealth community, with the aim of improving how mHealth interventions are designed, delivered, and evaluated to effectively carry out health behavior change.

If you are reading this, you are probably interested in these topics and that likely means you have something relevant to share. We invite you to add your comments and consider posting on a topic that is of interest to you. We hope this will be a lively space for people to toss out ideas, share opinions, respectfully debate one another, and collectively move the thinking forward on how to build well designed, effective mHealth interventions.

Imagine you want to develop a mobile application to change behavior, like help someone quit smoking. Your app might provide education on why quitting smoking is important and tools to help someone to prepare for and maintain cessation. But how effective your app is will depend, at least in part, on when your app provides these resources.

Because the importance of preventative public health measures remains high even if budgets are reduced, it is important that your content not only be high-quality, but also cost-effective and long lasting. The Smokefree.gov team has found a way to do that through the development of what we term “Flexible Assets” – content that is developed and formatted in such a way that it can easily be repurposed for...

We welcome guest submissions to this blog. The National Cancer Institute reserves the right to modify or reject any mHealth Monitor blog submission. Any views and opinions in blog posts, or those expressed in external links, do not constitute endorsement by the Smokefree.gov Initiative, National Cancer... Read more